Three residents of the International Space Station will take a short ride
aboard a Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft Tuesday, Sept. 28, relocating the spacecraft
to prepare for the arrival of the next set of station crew members.
Expedition 65 flight engineers Mark Vande Hei of NASA and Oleg Novitskiy and
Pyotr Dubrov of the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos will undock from the
station’s Earth-facing Rassvet module at 8:21 a.m. EDT. They will dock again
at the Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module at 9 a.m. This will be the first
time a spacecraft has attached to the new Nauka module, which arrived at the
station in July.
Live coverage of the maneuver will begin at 8 a.m. on NASA Television, the
NASA app, and the agency’s website.
The relocation will free the Rassvet port for the docking of another Soyuz
spacecraft, designated Soyuz MS-19, which will carry three Russian crew
members to the station in October. Soyuz commander and cosmonaut Anton
Shkaplerov of Roscosmos and spaceflight participants Klim Shipenko and Yulia
Peresild are scheduled to launch to the station Tuesday, Oct. 5, from the
Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
This will be the 20th Soyuz port relocation in station history and the first
since March 2021.
Vande Hei and Dubrov are scheduled to remain aboard the station until March
2022. At the time of his return, Vande Hei will have set the record for the
longest single spaceflight for an American. Novitskiy, Shipenko, and
Peresild are scheduled to return to Earth in October aboard the Soyuz MS-18
spacecraft.
For more than 20 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the
International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and
demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible
on Earth. As a global endeavor, 244 people from 19 countries have visited
the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 3,000 research
and educational investigations from researchers in 108 countries and areas.
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